Longer waits for marijuana than cronuts

In states with medical marijuana, doctor waiting lists are months long

By

JenWieczner

Illinois became the 20th state to legalize medical marijuana Thursday, following New Hampshire a week earlier—meaning that doctors there will in effect be able to prescribe pot for their patients.

But people waiting for a prescription shouldn’t hold their breath: Even after medical marijuana comes to a state, it can take months to find a doctor willing to recommend the treatment. The waiting list for an appointment in Illinois at MarijuanaDoctors.com, a booking site for physicians specializing in weed, was up to 1,386 people less than an hour after Gov. Pat Quinn signed the state’s legalization bill. And in the week since New Hampshire went legal, the waiting list for a doc stretched 25%, to 812 patients. “Right after that happened the phones just went crazy,” says John Nicolazzo, COO of The Medical Cannabis Network, the parent company of MarijuanaDoctors. See also: 10 things Generation Y won’t tell you

Part of the reason for the long lines is that patient demand far overshadows the number of doctors willing to recommend marijuana, especially in states that have only recently allowed it. At the moment, there are no physicians in Illinois taking appointments on MarijuanaDoctors, though four are in the process of opening clinics there specializing in pot prescriptions, with three traveling from Michigan (where medicinal weed is already legal), Nicolazzo says. In New Hampshire, two doctors may be ready to start seeing patients as soon as mid August, he says. But patients may still have to wait a while: In Massachusetts, where the appointment queue reached some 3,000-people, many patients are still waiting to see the seven doctors listed since legalization took effect Jan. 1.

Many of those waiting jumped the gun: Doctors in Illinois and New Hampshire won’t be permitted to sign off on pot til 2014. Still, people join the waitlists even before states go legal, and the lines grow 30 to 40% after the laws pass, Nicolazzo says; he expects nearly 2,000 will be waiting in Illinois by the end of August. “There is a huge demand for physicians to recommend this kind of treatment to their patients,” Nicolazzo says.

The shortage of pot docs is mostly due to physician skepticism and ambivalence from medical societies towards marijuana, which the government still considers a Schedule 1 controlled substance, or a drug “with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Because of that status, physicians can’t technically prescribe marijuana like they would other pharmaceuticals; rather, they can recommend it or certify that a patient would benefit from getting high — and patients take that recommendation to a dispensary to get the “prescription” filled. Still, many doctors refuse: “We feel that marijuana is an untested treatment,” says Travis Harker, a family medicine physician and president of the New Hampshire Medical Society. “This is uncharted territory, it’s still not a legal drug under federal law, so I think a lot of physicians will be rightly cautious about recommending this.”

The American Medical Association doesn’t endorse marijuana or cannabis programs but believes more clinical studies are needed on the use of marijuana in medicine, and supports review of marijuana’s controlled substance status in order to facilitate that research.

Even though a federal appeals court unanimously ruled in 2002 that doctors’ licenses can’t be revoked for recommending medical marijuana, “A lot of doctors have an anxiety about this,” says Dan Riffle, director of federal policies for the Marijuana Policy Project. Indeed, there are so few docs willing to prescribe marijuana that when a physician first signs up on MarijuanaDoctors.com, patients often request appointments within 30 to 45 minutes, Nicolazzo says.

Of those pioneering physicians, some find the grass is actually greener in the weed business, and abandon traditional medicine altogether. Patients pay $150 to $300 per marijuana prescription, as insurance doesn’t cover the appointment or the drug, doctors say. One physician left his family medicine practice because he was getting more patients through the medical marijuana program, Nicolazzo says. While patients can ask their primary-care physician or regular disease specialist to authorize their use of medical marijuana—in fact, some states, including Illinois and New Hampshire, require a pre-existing doctor-patient relationship for pot scripts—more often, doctors who do so operate clinics dedicated to the herb. “Most of the time, you’ve found a new market that’s been created for physicians willing to write the recommendations, and they end up building a business around that,” says Adam Bierman, CEO of Medmen, a marketing and consulting firm for marijuana dispensaries.

Juan Camilo Bernal / Shutterstock.com

To limit the market for pot doctors, Illinois and New Hampshire included restrictions in their laws, so marijuana can only be prescribed for people with debilitating health conditions and symptoms, such as cancer and AIDS. “The bill was narrowly tailored so we wouldn’t have an explosion of patients getting therapeutic cannabis,” Harker says. Requirements that doctors have an established relationship with their marijuana doctor “should alleviate pressure to have these marijuana mills where people walk in and see someone for three minutes and walk out with a marijuana certification,” he adds.

But patients who get on the waiting list now for a doctor may be a step closer to getting their medical marijuana card, since they will have a chance to develop that relationship by the time state laws kick in allowing the doctor to sign off. “It is so hard to find those doctors, so patients can start to see the doctor now as they would a primary-care physician,” Nicolazzo says. “By having a pre-existing relationship there, we think it helps to legitimize the industry further and also helps protect the doctor and patient from any liability issues.”

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